Hand In Hand

They walked toward the Williamsburg Bridge, Miriam by his side. Even with her hat on, she barely reached his shoulder, yet they walked at a steady pace, matching their steps. Nyezhiner raised his hand in the air.

“How can it be?” he asked. They’d lived near each other for two years in Williamsburg yet never met. “It’s unbelievable!”

Miriam looked up at him. Softly, warmly, his gray eyes met hers. Their walking together, with him holding her arm, was un­expected but somehow not surprising. It was as if their walking arm in arm on this lovely evening had been determined long ago.

They joined the crowd on Clinton Street. Tall tenements rose up on both sides, blocking  the sky. The street was full of horse-drawn carts and manure. A car honked and children made a rack­et. It was still light out, but the gas lamps had been turned on, and the bright shop windows displayed lingerie, corsets, stylish hats, wedding clothes to buy or rent.

On the stoops sat women in wigs and kerchiefs who looked as if they were just off the boat. They gazed at everything as if in a dream.

Miriam made her way through the crowd with small dainty steps. Her clothes and her bearing made her look as if she’d come from uptown to see the slums.

Nyezhiner bent down to her, his face aglow. “How do you like all this, our Jewish tumult, eh?” he asked. “Isn’t it amazing that children manage to grow up here? And with color in their cheeks, too! Miraculous!”

“Miraculous?” said Miriam, smiling. “Then I must be a mira­cle, too. I grew up near here, on Avenue B.”

“Really?”

“Right off the ship,” she said. “My mother was a widow, and I was the youngest of four. I walked on this street all the time and looked in the shop windows with envy.”

“Really? On Avenue B!”

“Yes, the same Avenue B you celebrate in your poems.”

“Well . . . in one of my very early works.”

Miriam looked at him curiously. Something in his tone seemed apologetic, as if he’d long since outgrown that early poem, but she wasn’t sure. She’d always liked the poem, knew it practically by heart. She knew all his shorter poems by heart, having read them in newspapers and journals. And, indeed, that was how Ada had introduced the two of them earlier that evening.

“Meet one of your readers: Miriam Eidelberg. She knows all your poems by heart!” And Ada’s small blue eyes had twinkled with laughter, her bosom swelling with pride. It was she who brought Miriam all the newspapers and journals that published Di Yunge, the young Yiddish poets. Ada was the leading lady of Yiddish literature.

Miriam had felt embarrassed, like a child whose clever words were repeated to strangers.

Nyezhiner had looked at her. “I’ll bet you write poems, too.” When Miriam laughed, he added, “Such a pretty laugh.”

Since then he hadn’t left her side. Now he was walking her home, and Ada, who had brought her to the poetry reading a few hours earlier, had blown her a kiss and stayed on East Broadway to go to a café with Nyezhiner’s colleague, Yankev Shor.

They came to the bridge, whose white stone steps beckoned them up to the promenade. Underneath, a tangle of streetcars ran back and forth to Brooklyn.

“Come. Let’s walk across. It’s not far. You must have done it often if you live in Williamsburg.”

“But never the whole way,” Miriam confessed with a guilty smile. “On a nice day, I often walk partway across with my daugh­ter. She likes to look at the water, the barges, the ships.”

“You have a child!” Nyezhiner tried to read her expression by the light of the street lamp. Her face seemed childishly young, the skin smooth, with little written upon it. He wanted to draw a fin­ger over that smoothness, to touch the lashes that hid her dark eyes.

“Come,” he said, taking the lead. “I’ll show you New York at night, when it’s all lit up.”

He took her arm and they went up the stone steps, even though it was time for her to hurry home and tell Dinaleh her bedtime sto­ry. The child was waiting.

It was Miriam’s first time up on the bridge in the evening. No one was about. A cool breeze wafted over her face, and a musty dampness emanated from the river as it flowed between stone em­bankments. A barge crept along, slow as a turtle. In the distance, the Brooklyn Bridge hung like a spider web. The windows of the skyscrapers glittered with a cold, flickering light.

They stood without speaking. Then Nyezhiner pointed at the city. “Well, what do you say? Do you like it?”

Miriam didn’t know what to say. Whenever she’d viewed this scene through the streetcar windows, the flickering lights had struck her as cold and unwelcoming.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, “but a bit eerie, don’t you think?”

Nyezhiner agreed. It occurred to him that maybe this was pre­cisely why he came here so often: just to feel, again and again, the uncanny hugeness of the city, its enormous strangeness.

He took her arm again and they walked on in silence. How odd, Miriam thought, that this person she’d just met, with whom she’d spoken for the very first time today, should seem both famil­iar and unfamiliar, like a long-lost relative.

Nyezhiner stopped to light a cigarette and leaned on the rail­ing. “Are you tired?” he asked. He gestured at a bench. “Shall we sit?”

“No, thank you.” She was not at all tired and didn’t want to sit down. But her high-heeled shoes were hurting her. She’d worn them because she hadn’t expected to be walking. She leaned on the railing beside him, standing first on one foot and then on the other, rotating her slender ankles like a ballet student practicing her moves.

Nyezhiner had noticed her lemon-yellow shoes, how they laced up, how they creased softly at the ankles. He liked looking at a well-made shoe on a pretty foot and paid particular attention to the quality of the stitching.

“You’re wearing deerskin shoes,” he said, “and you wear them well!”

Miriam giggled. A memory flashed into her mind. When she was fifteen, a boy had complimented her shoes. But “deerskin”! Only a poet would use such a word.

She took his arm. “Let’s go,” she said. “My heels aren’t hurting anymore, and I should have been home long ago. My daughter is waiting for her bedtime story.”

Nyezhiner walked quietly at her side, shortening his steps to match hers. Her bright yellow shoes flashed beside his dark ones as if whispering a secret.

“You look like a child,” he said, breaking the silence, “but you already have a child. How did you manage that?”

“How did I manage it?” Miriam said. “What do you mean? Any woman can have a child at seventeen or eighteen or even earlier. But I’m not sure it’s a good thing. Should a child have a mother who never had a girlhood? A mother who wishes she were still a girl herself?”

She stopped, afraid she’d said too much. She rarely spoke about herself, even with people she knew well. And here she was confiding in a virtual stranger, walking with him arm in arm across the bridge as if they were parading across a red carpet while her child waited for her at home.

Nyezhiner felt her hidden sadness. He’d known at first sight that she wasn’t happy; he could always sense such things. He was drawn to unhappy women. In Miriam, though, he saw not so much an unhappy woman as a young girl whose restlessness had no name, her longing no object; and there arose in him a kind of elegiac song, an echo that sang to him of something he had missed out on and would never have. At thirty-three, he already felt well into his autumn years. His youth was over and done with, lost and gone away . . . A line of a poem passed through his mind like a ray of light and disappeared. He shivered and took Miriam’s hand in both of his, once more looking at her face in the moonlight.

“My God! You’re just a child yourself,” he said, “yet you’re al­ready burdened with motherhood.”

Miriam pulled her hand away. He had touched on something that bothered her deeply. She would gladly sacrifice herself for Di­naleh. She was devoted to her child. Yet she had decided not to have any more children even though David wanted them. She wanted to study, to travel, to write, to learn all about the world. Would she want all this even if she were married to someone other than David? She didn’t know.

She turned toward Nyezhiner. “You were very young when you became a father, too,” she said. “Ada told me, and I can see from your poems that the responsibilities of fatherhood weigh on you. What is it like to have to support five children and then . . .”

Miriam was surprised by her own audacity. How many times had she asked him these questions in her mind, even before meet­ing him? Now the questions came tumbling out, and she wanted to ask more: Why had he fallen out of love so quickly with the other woman, the one for whom he’d left his wife and children? But of course she wouldn’t ask him, no matter how badly she wanted to know. How strange that his personal life mattered so much to her. As soon as Ada had told her that her favorite poet, whom she’d never even met, had left his wife and children for another woman, she’d found herself feeling personally involved, even jealous. She still didn’t understand why.

Nyezhiner looked at her, taken aback, then offered a small smile. After all, he reflected, he had struck an intimate tone with her, so he shouldn’t be surprised by her questions.

“I won’t go into all that now,” he said quietly. “Maybe another time. You seem to know a lot more about my personal life than I imagined.”

“Oh, I know very little. Only what I hear from Ada. And a word here and there from people who are curious about the lives of po­ets and artists.”

Nyezhiner smiled bitterly. “Artists! Poets!” he scoffed. He laughed out loud. “The truth is, I’m an ordinary worker. I sit at a machine sewing uppers for women’s shoes—fine shoes like yours. You see that stitch there? I’m a master of that seam, a true pro­fessional, probably the best in the business. But poems? Someone like me, someone with my talent, should stop fooling around with shoes and devote himself full time to writing. I mean it! Some of my friends don’t work. They go hungry, but at least they aren’t tied to a machine. I envy them, but I can’t do that. I have five children, so I have to keep sewing shoes. It’s the one thing I can do for them. Do you see? I’m responsible for them.”

Miriam hung her head. Of course she understood there was no letting go of the responsibility for one’s children. Ever. Suddenly she felt sorry—sorry for him and sorry for herself. In the lamplight he looked as tired as her brother Moyshe when he came home from the shop. In fact, she could see a resemblance between the two of them—both tall, both handsome.

On they walked, without talking, as if all that mattered was to keep walking. Miriam forgot herself, forgot that her shoes hurt.

She walked as if she had already outwalked all her troubles and now could walk all night. Suddenly she could hear the squealing of the streetcars in the plaza on the Brooklyn side of the bridge, and her eyes were dazzled by the oncoming headlights and the stream­ing light of restaurants, cafeterias, stores, all ablaze with signs.

“That was quick!” Miriam exclaimed. “I thought the bridge was much longer.”

They made their way through the traffic and turned onto a quiet side street by the river.

“So this is where you live?” he asked.

“About five blocks away.”

“In one of the new buildings?”

“Yes, it’s two years old. We were among the first to move in.”

“Two years ago,” said Nyezhiner, “I was working here by the bridge. There used to be a lot of shoe factories here. Now they’ve moved deeper into Brooklyn, and these modern apartment build­ings have taken their place. I used to hang around here for hours with my friends when there was no work. Brooklyn is horribly gray and monotonous, the streets endless, but we barely noticed. We walked around talking about poetry and yearning for the cities we came from, the familiar landscapes back home.”

“There are beautiful cities here, too,” Miriam said, coming to the defense of America and Brooklyn, “and beautiful streets. Ada lives not far from here in a wonderful old mansion that’s been made into apartments. Her street is so wide, so beautiful.”

“Yes, I know there are still some old streets full of beautiful old houses, but most of Brooklyn is just old, not beautiful.”

“What about you?” Miriam asked. “Where in Brooklyn do you live?”

“You’ll be disappointed to hear I live in the poor section, in a little furnished room. I don’t even have a desk.”

“Really? I have a desk I hardly ever use. You can have it.”

“That’s very kind,” he said with a smile, “but my room isn’t big enough. Not to mention that I’ve never actually used a desk. I used to love writing at the kitchen table, especially late at night, when everyone was asleep and the coals in the stove were still smolder­ing . . .”

Miriam imagined that kitchen, that table, when his wife and children were asleep. Lines from his poems came to mind, and now she understood them better. Sad, sad lines . . . and yet, could it be that now he was longing for those late hours at the kitch­en table, warming himself with poems while his loved ones slept nearby? She wanted to ask: If he was lonely and the other woman who’d been the cause of it all was no longer with him, why didn’t he go back to his family? But she wouldn’t ask; it was none of her business.

Nyezhiner took her hands and bent to kiss them. “You’re a good person, Miriam, I can tell. We’ve just met, but we’ve known each other for years. Am I right?”

Miriam didn’t answer, but she agreed with him. He was right. They had known each other for years. His every gesture felt oddly familiar, like a scribbled line she knew she’d read before, without remembering where or when.

They arrived at a tidy brick building. “Here we are,” said Mir­iam.

Nyezhiner noted the house number: 777.

“Will you come in? You’re very welcome. David must be home from the pharmacy by now.” She didn’t say “my husband,” but he understood. “You can meet my mother, too. She’s here tonight. You’ll like her: all she ever reads is prayer books—never a single line of poetry.”

“I like her already.”

“So come up, won’t you?”

“Another time, with pleasure.”

“Next Friday? David is home early on Fridays.”

“All right then, I’ll be glad to.”

“A special guest for Shabbos!” And Miriam quickly said good­bye and disappeared inside.

Nyezhiner remained standing in front of the building. He looked again at the address: 777. He didn’t need to write it down. He would remember.

But maybe it would be better not to come next Friday, better not to see her again. He had a feeling that getting together would do her no favors. He had never made a woman happy. At that moment he felt a pang of pity for himself, for her, and for David, whom he didn’t even know.